In Flanders Fields Museum

Today I visited the museum ‘In Flanders Fields’. I am very impressed and moved by what I saw today. In Flanders Fields Museum takes you back to the Great War of 1914-1918. You experience history at first hand as a soldier or a nurse, as an inhabitant of Ypres or as a refugee… You not only witness with your own eyes the destruction of a whole region and the atrocities this war brought about but you will also experience the hope and resurrection of a city like Ypres. Quotations show you what people lived through and how they felt during the Great War. Sometimes they speak to you from screens, sometimes you have to read their words on panels.

When you enter the In Flanders Field Museum, you receive a keycard which represents the identity of a person who lived during the Great War. I was Marie Curie whom I know since I visited the Marie Curie Museum in her birthplace in Ulica Freta when I was in Warsaw last year.
When the war breaks out, Marie Curie was already an influential figure. She and her daughter Irène decided to use their knowledge for the benefit of war victims. They fit out vans with radiological equipment, and train the staff who are to use them. They also equip campaign hospitals, which are placed behind the front lines. Marie Curie was in Veurne from December 1914 onwards. In January 1915 she was in Poperinge, where she has radiological equipment set up in the hospital that is accommodated in a country mansion.

It was a very moving day for me … the next few days I want to learn more of the Great War and it significance for this region …